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The Voyager spacecraft forty years old and still going.

LoveCake

LoveCake

Member
tbzKf2c.gif

https://twitter.com/NASAVoyager

Today the 5th September is the date that Voyager 1 launched in 1977 and it's forty years to the day that it started its cosmic voyage.

The Voyager program is a continuing American scientific program that employs two robotic probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, to study the outer Solar System.[1] They were launched in 1977 to take advantage of a favorable alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and are now exploring the outer boundary of the heliosphere in interstellar space. via Wiki.

I love space I always have and I have a soft spot for the Voyager spacecraft as they were launched the same year I was born.

NASA has a special fortieth anniversary page set up with posters and infographics.

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Voyager 1 sent back probably the most important image in all of human history, in fact the image contains all of human history.

Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan

Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU), Earth's apparent size is less than a pixel; the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of space, among bands of sunlight scattered by the camera's optics.

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May Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 continue for many eons to come, carrying humanity's message that "we were here".
 
W

Wyndstryker

Member
imagine the day where advanced space travel tech can allow us to catch up to the voyager probe and take it to a museum

that is if we don't run into aliens that find the probe first
 
E

e_i

Member
Love those nuclear batteries. There's a military base near me (Camp Evans) that made them for deep sky objects (I don't know if they made for the Voyager though).
 
Tal Shiar Agent

Tal Shiar Agent

Member
Wyndstryker said:
imagine the day where advanced space travel tech can allow us to catch up to the voyager probe and take it to a museum

that is if we don't run into aliens that find the probe first
Click to expand...
We should absolutely not do that. We should let these probes continue on their path forever.

What we should do is create a probe that can travel as fast as we can possibly make it go and send it off towards a candidate system for life.
 
K

Kysen

Member
Using nuclear fuel was a good idea for those craft. No way solar would cut it right about now. Insane how far away they are.
 
F

Freeza Under The Shower

Member
Casual reminder to certain politicians that ongoing data collection on the two Voyagers and other probes is also a Space Agency task.

Also, like Stinkles I was going to reference Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was published in 1979.
So I'll give you this: in the movie, V-Ger's energy field is said to be 82 AU, short for Astronomical Units. A single AU is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. Neptune's orbit is roughly 30 AU from Earth, and the Kuiper Belt, the collection of icy bodies at the edge of our known solar system, stops rather abruptly at 50 AU.
Those two distances combined gets you the full size of V-Ger.

Voyager 1 is currently, after 40 years, at a distance of nearly 140 AU from Earth, and Voyager 2 at 115 AU.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjLSf8y94fU
 
LoveCake

LoveCake

Member
Insane Metal said:
How could you NOT link this video, OP?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYNIsgDrIRE

Edit: Voyager 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8TA7BU2Bvo

It's incredible. :)
Click to expand...

I know, I didn't want to post too much, I wanted to just start it off and hoped that others would post content to expand the thread.

Both Voyager spacecraft could well be the only evidence that humanity every existed.

Voyager - To the Final Frontier is a very good documentary on the story of the missions.
 
F

FyreWulff

Member
Insane Metal said:
?

Why is that? Since they're in a vaccum they'll continue their journey, unless they hit something. Unless you mean power and not fuel?
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm talking about when they'll lose the ability to communicate any data back.

edit: they also need to expend the nuclear fuel to warm their electronics. at some point they'll have juice but all their shit will be frozen.
 
T

tonysidaway

Member
FyreWulff said:
I'm going to has a sad once they run out of fuel

edit: it's 2034 and 2040 when they run out
Click to expand...

According to Wikipedia, Voyager 1 is planned to start to shut down its scientific instruments in 2020 and by some time in 2025-2030 it will be unable to power any single instrument. More up-to-date information on this could be available directly from NASA, though.
 
C

CTLance

Member
I always get a bit misty eyed when I think of those two probes, as far as we humans go they are amazingly fast and far away, but on a cosmic scale it's like they never even launched. Yet the concept of sending out a message to whoever may be out there, that at one point in time we existed is so incredibly appealing.

Time to put M/A/R/R/S's Pump Up the Volume on my playlist. Those flyby sequences in the music video stuck with me. So whenever I think of the two voyagers, I need to watch it. Weird, but what can I do.
 
F

Forerunner

Member
It just shows you how massive space is. They are traveling at 35k mph and it would still take thousands of years to get to Alpha Centauri.
 
T

Toxi

Banned
A great achievement for humanity, but I can't help but think Dinobot would still be alive if it weren't for the golden records. ;-(
 
X

Xe4

Banned
Happy birthday! Thanks for all the cool science and pictures, and for still gathering data 40 years on!

B1G_A1AN said:
Found this, showing how far both craft are away from the Earth and how far they have to go.

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Click to expand...
That's really cool. Thanks for sharing.
 
Daniel Jackson

Daniel Jackson

Member
If we never achieve interstellar travel before the sun destroyes everything, those probes might be the last thing that will remain of humanity.
 
G

Goo

Member
I hope we can send out more probes. I love the idea of micro probes that can be accelerated to faster speeds than voyager 1 and 2.
 
LoveCake

LoveCake

Member
You can go here NASA Deep Space Network Live Data and you can see when data is being sent/received from various spacecraft, Voyager 1 is on now actually, there isn't much to look at actually but it does look cool.

Enter the intricate world of NASA's Deep Space Network as we provide you an inside look at how our team communicates and tracks multiple spacecraft within the solar system 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
This real-time data is updated every 5 seconds and will allow you to examine how quickly the data is being received, how long a signal takes to and from each spacecraft and the current state of the entire network.

Also there is a live Voyager tracker you can change the spacecraft on this also.

Slightly off topic, but I found this years ago:

Nikon - Universcale:

From the tiniest microcosm to the vast reaches of outer space,
Nikon's opto-electronics technologies reveal realms beyond the range of the naked eye.
In this presentation you will be able to see and experience how big or small things really are.

http://nikon.com/about/sp/universcale/index.htm
 
L

Luminaire

Member
Our legacy on a disc of gold. Billions of years from now, we'll be gone. Every single trace of us. But maybe one of those two will carry on, drifting endlessly into the uncaring universe, carrying all that is left of humanity and it's creations.
 
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